“Yes,” an HRT member spoke up. “What do you consider unusual activity?”
Jake looked at the large map on the wall behind him and then back to the HRT member. “Where we’re going, if it has two legs or leaves tire marks, it’s unusual.”
“Got it, sir.”
“Time is critical, gentlemen. Let’s load up.”
Jake and Honi put on the bullet-resistant vests supplied to them and picked up the M-16 rifles and ammo clips. The search team climbed into the three UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which took off, heading west-northwest in the predawn darkness. Their flight took them north of Gallup and into the low, scrub-covered Chuska Mountains, with a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet.
The darkness gave way to a gray diffused light as dawn approached. The terrain recognition software built into the UH-60 Black Hawk navigation system quickly identified a make-shift airstrip in a shallow valley. The three helicopters landed on the north end of the runway. The search team climbed out of the Black Hawks and spread out with weapons, ready to secure the area. Once the helicopter blades stopped and the dust settled, Jake listened intently for any sound. Only dead silence remained.
Jake, Honi and the search team slowly made their way down the dirt runway. Jake paused, reached down, picked up a pinch of the dirt and rubbed it between his fingers. Gritty. The same feel as the dust on the FedEx 208 Caravan. This is where it landed.
On the south end of the runway they found truck tire tracks leading up an incline to the right. A primitive road had been roughly carved out of the side of the valley. Half a mile up the slope was a widened flat area with a rock wall on the west side. The truck tracks pulled east, almost to the edge, swiveled, and backed up to the rock wall. Except the tracks didn’t stop several feet from the wall, as Jake expected; they went right under the wall.
“It’s a door,” Jake said. “It opens.”
Jake could now see that the generally flat nature of the wall was artificially constructed. He took his knuckles and rapped softly on the door. Fiberglass. Nice job. If I wasn’t standing right in front of it, I would have missed it. The door was about twelve feet high and thirty feet wide. Three members of the HRT grabbed the bottom of the door and pulled. The door started to open as the other HRT members dropped to the ground and aimed their rifles inside the enclosed space. The door continued to open and folded back inside the carved-out space near the ceiling. The space was empty, approximately fourteen feet high, thirty feet deep and thirty feet wide. The walls appeared to be solid rock and the floor was clean poured concrete. It was a man-made cave.
Jake found four light metallic scrape marks on the floor, each spaced fifteen feet apart in a perfect square pattern. “I want samples of the metal for analysis.”
The NEST unit carefully swept the enclosed area with their radiation sensors.
“B83 radiation signature,” one of the technicians reported. “The device was here.”
Another technician adjusted the settings on his equipment and walked slowly over the concrete area once again. He went back to the center of the area, adjusted his equipment again and started crawling around on the floor, his sensor a quarter of an inch above the pavement. Jake walked over to him.
“What have you got?”
The technician looked up at Jake with a worried expression. “Not here,” he whispered.
Jake raised his eyebrows and gave the man an inquisitive look.
“Give me a minute,” he said quietly.
Jake stepped back and continued to study the enclosed area. The logical thing was to fly the B83 out, but what kind of aircraft would fit in here? It was too short for a helicopter, and no way for a fixed-wing aircraft to get to the runway. The wings wouldn’t fit down the narrow road. Plus, the only tracks in the dirt were from the truck. More and more of the facts in this investigation just weren’t adding up.
The NEST technician stood up and walked out of the wide cave and motioned Jake to follow him. Jake motioned for Honi to join them. The three of them walked a quarter mile down the dirt road without saying a word. The technician stopped and turned to face Jake and Honi.
“Look,” he said quietly. “I know this may sound crazy to you, but you’ve got to listen. My name is Grigori Andropov. I’ve got a PhD in quantum physics. Agent Badger, you can check my security clearance when we get back inside cell phone coverage, that may help convince you that what I’m about to tell you is true. The military calls me out on special investigations. Things that are never meant to become public. I need you to keep that confidence. My life depends on it. I work under the name of Russell Stevens. My specialty is exotic radioactive materials and how they are affected by quantum fields.”
“Where did you get your PhD?” Jake asked.
“St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.”
Honi nodded. “It’s on the list.”
“So what did you find?”
“The B83 radioactive signature is there, alright. It’s on the surface of the concrete all around the room, except the center section is mixed with another radioactive substance.”
“A second weapon?”
Andropov shook his head. “Not a weapon, an energy source. It doesn’t even appear on our periodic table of elements. Theoretically, it’s element 115. I’ve seen this pattern before at different sites where the military sent me to investigate.”
“What kind of sites?”
Andropov hesitated. “UFO landing sites.”
“What?” Jake said, stepping back from Andropov. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“Really? UFO landing sites?” Honi asked.
Andropov nodded. “They’re real. I’ve seen them on the ground, too. When they take off, they leave a very distinctive energy pattern with residual radiation, just like you have in that cave.”
Jake was still skeptical. “And the four metallic scrapes on the floor?”
“Similar to the strut and pad pattern I’ve seen at other landing sites.”
Jake breathed out heavily. “So where is the B83?”
“I wish I had an answer for you. What I was working on was highly compartmentalized and very specialized.”
“Would you be willing to come into the NSA and work with us?” Honi asked.
“Maybe. I report directly to General Davies, no one else. If he wants me to be there, I’ll work with you. Otherwise…”
“General Roger L. Davies, Commanding General of the United States Army Forces Command?.That General Davies?”
Andropov nodded. “He’s the one who put me in your NEST unit. No one else knows, and I need it to stay that way.”
Jake glanced at Honi. She gave a quick nod. “Okay. It stays that way.”
They walked back and joined the group in the cave.
“A truck obviously carried the bomb from the FedEx plane to the cave. The radioactive residue is clearly present,” a member of the NEST unit said.
“If the truck brought the bomb to the cave, where is it?” another NEST member argued. “And if the truck left with the bomb and drove it away, why go to the cave at all? Why not just leave directly from the plane?”
Another member said, “There must have been something in the cave that someone needed. That’s why they drove to the cave. To pick up the other object.”
But someone else argued, “Why not put that object in the truck first and then leave directly from the plane?”
A fourth member of the six-man NEST unit stated, “If all the truck did was pick something up from the cave, the residual radiation wouldn’t be all over the floor. That would happen only if the B83 was physically unloaded from the truck.”